News Analysis Visitors to the Athens Olympics in August who want to see classical treasures such as the northern colonnade of the Parthenon will have to make do with buying postcards instead.

Construction workers stalk the dusty halls of some of the city's finest museums while priceless sections of the Acropolis have been dismantled and taken to the cleaners.

Seven years after Greece won its bid to bring the Games back to their birthplace, the country's cultural venues are proving even more difficult to get ready than their sporting counterparts.

Culture ministry officials, who had hoped to have the city's landmark, the Acropolis, looking its best by August, have conceded that scaffolding will be obscuring the view when Olympic tourists arrive.

"It's a disgrace," said Jeffrey Carson, a US art historian and classical scholar who lives in Greece.

"The Acropolis has been deconstructed and it's inconceivable that it will be put back exactly as it was," he said. "This was built by the greatest architect the world has known."

The exquisite temple of Athena Nike, part of the same 5th century BC temple complex, is also an Olympic no-show. It was dismantled for renovation and cannot be put back together in time.

"Although it is the smallest classical monument on the Acropolis, it turned out to be the biggest problem," said Haralambos Bouras chief of the Acropolis conservation committee.

The northern colonnade of the Parthenon would not be ready until 2006, officials said.

The good news is that the renovated western frieze of the Parthenon will be back on show in July.

The Elgin Marbles

The new Acropolis Museum, which was supposed to increase pressure on the UK government to return the contested Elgin Marbles, has not risen beyond its foundations.

Billed as the new home for the masterpiece friezes, removed in the 19th century by Lord Elgin and now housed in the British Museum in London, it will not even be partially ready come the start of the Olympic Games on 13 August.

The project, stuck on the drawing board for three decades, has drowned under a wave of objections from archaeologists and local residents who contested that the construction would destroy precious antiquities.